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Story labeling PBSO chief deputy as racist is fake news

Story labeling PBSO chief deputy as racist is fake news

A fake news story about PBSO’s chief deputy went viral last month, being picked up by news sites and shared thousands of times on Facebook. (Facebook)

For the past three weeks, one of PBSO’s top cops has been one of the most hated people on Facebook.

“He is the seed of his father, the devil,” a man from Jacksonville wrote.

“I’m literally sick to my stomach,” one woman posted.

“Take to his neighborhood,” said a man from New Jersey. “Embarrassing him, his family and community until he can’t take it no more.”

But while the outrage was real, the reason for it was fake.

On Oct. 24, a fake news article on an obscure website called DCWeekly.org, claimed the chief deputy for the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, Mike Gauger, was a white supremacist who wanted to rape and kill “a black man or a Jew.”

The fake story appeared so real — even citing what appeared to be a real PBSO report — that it was picked up by news sites and bloggers and shared thousands of times on Facebook, including by the comedian D.L. Hughley and the activist Tim Wise, who urged people to complain to PBSO.

While President Donald Trump has used the term “fake news” to attack legitimate news stories, the Gauger story more closely follows the script of the Russian misinformation campaigns that U.S. intelligence officials say spread maliciously false stories before the 2016 election.

By turning those same techniques loose on far less-prominent matters, the story shows just how easily “fake news” can be weaponized at the local level.

Tech-savvy former PBSO deputy Mark Dougan, who has had a long-running feud against Gauger, denied involvement. Still, he described in detail how quickly a website like DCWeekly could be created and filled with content.

“It takes 30 minutes, total, to set up a fake news site from start to finish,” Dougan told The Palm Beach Post.

The stories about Gauger spread so rapidly on social media that PBSO spokeswoman Teri Barbera said her own daughter confronted her after seeing it. Barbera said a captain’s daughter also asked him about it.

“They want to know, is this really happening?” Barbera said.

Although PBSO was blasted over it on Twitter and Facebook, Barbera said the department has not officially reached out to any of the websites or issued a statement correcting the stories.

“I’m so appalled I can’t even find the words to put out,” she said. “How do you go to a fake organization and correct fake news?”

The fake story cited a PBSO report that claimed a deputy had discovered Gauger posting on the now-defunct, neo-Nazi website, Stormfront, under the pseudonym “Krieger.” Krieger allegedly wanted to rape and kill a black man or a Jew.

The deputy supposedly went to Gauger’s home, where Gauger’s “mouth went dry and his completion (sic) became pale,” when confronted with the evidence, the report states. The deputy then presented the case to prosecutors, who said that if he pursued the matter Gauger would influence the investigation and end the deputy’s career.

But the report is entirely fake, The Post found.

The PBSO case number it cites corresponds to a completely unrelated incident. The report also redacts the name of the deputy who wrote it and doesn’t name anyone else in the report who could verify its authenticity.

And the idea that a deputy would go rogue and try to bring criminal charges against the second-highest-ranking person in the department, a man who routinely deals with the county’s black and Jewish groups, which make up a large portion of the sheriff’s Democratic base, is implausible at best.

But that didn’t stop bloggers and news sites from picking it up. The most notable was Raw Story, a site that primarily aggregates news from around the web and has more than 1 million followers on Facebook.

Without verifying the DCWeekly story, Raw Story reporter David Ferguson picked it up under the headline, “Top Florida law enforcement official plotted to abduct, rape and murder ‘a black man or a Jew.’”

The story was eventually taken down without explanation, but not before the explosive piece became a weapon, spreading on Facebook and generating thousands of negative comments about Gauger and PBSO.

Wise, the anti-racism activist, shared it on his Facebook page. He later took it down and apologized, vowing never to share from Raw Story again.

“I am not only ashamed for having asked people to call the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office to demand his firing, or to Tweet at them, I am beyond pissed,” Wise wrote on Facebook. “There is no excuse for Raw Story not having fact-checked a story of this magnitude before running it.”

Ferguson declined to comment. Raw Story Managing Editor Eric Dolan did not respond to a request for comment.

How to do fake news

Nobody has officially claimed responsibility for DCWeekly. Dougan, who was sued by Gauger for libel in 2012, has tormented Gauger and his boss, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw ever since leaving PBSO in 2009 after three years.

For years, Gauger, 70, has been as much the face of PBSO as the sheriff, frequently speaking on public panels about local issues, such as mental illness, and serving on the boards of community groups, including the Urban League of Palm Beach County. He declined to comment for this story.

In 2016, the FBI raided Dougan’s Palm Beach Gardens home and questioned him about how the home addresses of 3,600 officers, prosecutors and judges ended up on Dougan’s website. He has since fled to Russia, where he’s continued his campaign against PBSO.

In an interview, Dougan would not admit to being involved in the site or the article.

But he described in unusual detail how someone could recreate DCWeekly.org and the fake article from scratch.

First, he said he would create an official-sounding, nonpartisan news site, like “DCWeekly.”

Then he would fill the site with content by using an RSS web feed, taking real news stories from around the web and copying them onto the site. The vast majority of DCWeekly’s content appears word-for-word elsewhere on the web.

Then, he said, all you would have to do is write a fake news article “and inject it in there somewhere.”

“Anybody could do that,” Dougan said. “Anybody who knows about WordPress knows that.”

The Gauger story went up on the site on the same day it was created.

Other attacks

It is not the only time PBSO has been subjected to this kind of fake news campaign. A few days after the Gauger post, DCWeekly did an article accusing PBSO’s color guard of carrying a Confederate flag to events, alongside the American and Florida state flags. The fake article cited an obviously altered photo of PBSO’s color guard.

In 2015, a website called DC Post posted a story claiming that Bradshaw told a group of Boynton Beach residents that it was OK for them to run over protesters who are marching in the road.

The story also was picked up by random websites. PBSO and the Boynton group he was supposedly addressing came out and said he was never at the meeting.

And Dougan was involved in another misinformation campaign in 2012. The day before the August election, an email went out to thousands of Palm Beach County residents purportedly from then-County Commissioner Burt Aaronson.

The email claimed Aaronson was not endorsing “the corrupt Ric Bradshaw,” a fellow Democrat, prompting Aaronson to angrily denounce it. The website linked to the email campaign was owned by Dougan.

Dougan blames Gauger for his decision to move to Russia, leaving two children behind.